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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

That's where the attention belongs, Zuckerberg has controlling interest[1]:

> According to an estimate from CNBC last year, that means Zuckerberg and insiders control about 70 percent of Facebook’s voting shares, with Zuckerberg controlling about 60 percent. So whatever shareholders are voting on, Zuckerberg and those closest to him get to have the final say.

So the rest of the "leadership" are effectively Zuckerberg's proxies. Absolutely nothing Facebook does is beyond his control.

[1] https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/30/18644755/facebook-stock...

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If you have more people trying to sell your stock than want to buy it, it doesn't matter how much controlling interest there is. The board has to keep the market happy.

The market doesn't care about user privacy or ethics. The market only cares about making more money than was made before. They only care if the source of data (us) get so fed up we stop giving them our data.

> The board has to keep the market happy.

With Zuckerberg controlling 60% of the votes (and thus able to remove any of them unilaterally), the board has exactly one person they need to keep happy.

Zuckerberg could decide tomorrow that Facebook should be converted into a christian singles dating site, share price be damned, and the board would comply or they would be replaced.

I think there is a bit of a disconnect recently with how people think companies "should" be governed and how they actual are these days.

The tech boom has put, at various points, incredible power in the founders hands to dictate the terms of how corporate governance works. In the case of Facebook, Zuckerberg has controlling interest in the company. He can overrule shareholders and the board via his special class of shares.

An even more egregious example is Snap (NYSE: SNAP) - shareholders who purchase common shares of Snap don't even having voting rights at all. Between Evan + Bobby - they have 90% control of the shares. Even if you buy 100% of the available shares, you cannot even vote on company governance - let alone have any sort of control over the business.

These stock arrangements are pretty surreal. Buying shares in SNAP gives you zero say the operation of the company, but they make up for this by also giving you zero dividends. I'm not sure what the point is in owning the shares at all, it feels like the only value in owning the shares is that you might find another sucker willing to pay even more for them in the future.

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